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8 comments
Against
will123455y ago
**TL;DR: atrocities committed by humans prove evil does exist.**
There are a number of historical and contemporary events that prove evil does exist.
• The Holocaust resulted in the death of 6 million Jews between 1939 and 1945.
• The slave trade continued over 3 centuries (16th, 17th and 18th). Involved taking people against their will and selling them to people, mainly in America, for economic purposes.
• The Manchester arena bombing. 22 people killed and 250 injured attending an Arianna Grande concert.
These events do not even begin to scratch the surface of the number of massacres, butcheries and genocides that have occurred throughout history. The victims of such crimes can only have thought that evil caused these things to occur. The individual experiences of these people is unthinkable and prove that evil does exist.
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Turi5y ago
Super interesting thought here... That evil can exist in retrospect or in the minds of victims or survivors or spectators, rather than having to exist as a natural category...
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Tressa_Rose5y ago
The slave trade is still very alive and well. It just switched it's victims to women and children and are selling them for sexual purposes. It makes me really sad that sex trafficking is not a bigger issue. It needs to be in the spotlight. Blacks and Indians were slaves to white people for many years and went through horrible unspeakable pains without a doubt.
But I wish everyone would remember that slavery is still happening every day, imagine a world where races stop fighting and comparing/competing with each other, and combined all that energy towards helping speak out about, stand up for, free all the mothers, sisters, and daughters lost in captivity, and stop the current slave trade
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JeanPolo_3y ago
But those events, as horrible as they are, do not prove that an evil exists. You cannot prove that something exists just because of its definition. For example, let's imagine that a god creates wind. When I go outside i feel the wind so that proves that the god of wind exists. Feels stupid isn't it ?
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skaisayshi3y ago
Look through the eyes of the people that performed or agreed with these acts. Obviously to us we would believe it's evil and morally incorrect, but to someone like Hitler it wasn't. Evil in the end doesn't exist, morality and ethics come into play, but it's all opinionated regardless of what you believe.
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For
freyaehope5y ago
**TL;DR: Evil depends on free will, which doesn’t exist**
• Neuroscientists correlate the _metaphysical_ concept of evil to certain types of [_physical_ brain activity](https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/does-evil-exist-neuroscientists-say-no.html) that causes us to make decisions. They can map out and observe our choices, which seem to occur in the brain significantly [before](https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751) we become aware of making our decision. Philosophers and scientists have used this fact to argue against the idea of free will – our brains seem wired to make certain decisions, which suggests that our actions are predestined.
• If [free will does not exist](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion) and we cannot act autonomously, it follows that we cannot commit evil. Evil is not simply a bad or harmful action, but an [intention](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01062301.2017.1327168?journalCode=rspr20) to carry out a bad or harmful action. If our intentions are predestined, and therefore not truly conscious, the concept of evil cannot exist.
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Tressa_Rose5y ago
Whether or not we are concsiously aware at the moment of, or right after is not really relevant, because subconsciously it is still a part of us and our brain that is making the choice. Which really just means that the person is inherently born evil. And free will would then be non-existent, so by that theory it would mean that they would not be curable.
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Commentary
joe__biden5y ago
It's an opinion; one president that may be fine with you may be evil to another.
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